The Spawning (55 page)

They were looking at a city and on a scale that dwarfed the great pyramids.

Coyle knew it was not of human origin. Perhaps part of the ruins that Dr. Gates from Kharkov Station had discovered. But that had been in the Dominion Range, an easy hundred miles from here . . . could the ruins extend that far?

Of course they can . . . quit trying to put this in human perspective. What you're seeing is light years beyond that. This place is older than the mountains and the race who built it are old as time itself.

The gully reached down farther than their lights would illuminate, the city going on and on, descending into blackness as it clung to the gully wall, then rising up out of the darkness below and ascending to unimaginable heights above. It was immense. Just a piece of an ancient city, but one that was mammoth and spread out as far as their lights could reach . . . the glacier reaching down in places and engulfing it completely in runnels and flows of clear blue ice.

What Coyle saw was the face of it and it was very crowded and compressed like some Medieval slum, everything pressed together, intersecting, and overlapping, so geometrically busy that it taxed the brain to follow its lines and try to figure out where one thing began and where another ended. There were stacks of blocks giving way to bulbous cylinders and ornate columns, they themselves cut through by towers and cones welded to rectangles and bubble-like obelisks and narrow piping which gave away seamlessly to gargantuan spires and steeples that vanished high above in the primal darkness.

All of it was honeycombed with oval passages that looked like wormholes in the face of that nightmarish, cyclopean alien tomb. It was made of some glossy black rock that looked oddly machined, set with discs and tubes, shafts and something like obtuse gear teeth.

He could not get past the idea that it almost looked like it was machined from a single massive slab of metal or some stone that was a composite of both.

In the back of his skull, there was a thrumming noise that began to make his head ache and a voice, a single traumitized voice that said,
your race was born to this place. Let the cradle of humanity be its grave.

They could not reach the city over the gully and, honestly, to a man they did not want to.

It was bad enough standing where they were, viewing it from a distance without crawling through those nighted passages and claustrophobic tangles. There were spaces within, they knew, hollows and corridors and labyrinthine rooms haunted by primrodial memory that would strip the unprotected human mind bare.

If the urban legends were true and what Dr. Gates of Kharkov said were in fact reality, then it was cold alien wombs like this where the human race had not only been born but taken through the ages and modified with the ultimate goal of raising not only intelligence but an intelligence that could be harvested.

“We're not the first here,” Reja said and his voice was almost shocking in the silence. If he hadn't have spoken it was hard to say how long they would have stood there like that, gape-jawed, wide-eyed, their minds cycling down into bottomless black depths.

He was pointing his flashlight beam at something tangled in a rocky dip.

They all went over there.

It was a body . . . yet it didn't look right. It was wearing ECWs, bunny boots, standard-issue red parka . . . but it looked deflated.

And it was.

For inside those ECWs were only bones, bones encrusted with frozen blood. A skull stared up at them from the hood.

“What the hell could do something like that?” Long said.

Something unbelievable,
Coyle thought.
Something that sucks the flesh off a man and leaves only bones and clothing behind.

“It must be one of the engineers, the survey guys who'd been working with Dryden,” Dayton said. “Reese, I think.”

Coyle turned back to the city. As he panned it with his light, that thrumming noise began to increase in his head. It came with sharp fingers of pain that seemed to blot everything out in pulsations of blinding white light that made his vision blur.

As sensory imput was dampened, he began to hear–

Screams.

A great exhaled susurration of screams echoing through his head. Not the screams of two or three or even a dozen, but the screams of hundreds, of thousands, all of them screaming in writhing agony . . . and he knew, he knew from the pit of his being, that these were the voices from the city . . . the voices of his ancestors that had been brought here to undergo forced mutation, genetic engineering, vivsection... a hundred techniques that filled them with wild superstitious terror and a bone-deep physical agony, a carnival of suffering that was literally nameless . . .

When he came out of it, riven with fright, he could nearly smell those awful places in the city where the techniques had been practiced . . . he could smell blood and marrow, spilled guts and siphoned fluids, biopsies and transplants, tears and vomit and insanity and, yes, the sharp acid stink of fear.

“We better get the hell out of here,” Long said and meant it. “That chopper will touch down again in forty-five minutes and I don't want to miss it.”

The fright beneath his words was palpable and he had every reason in the world to be afraid. They all did. Coyle was nearly overwhelmed by it himself. The Old Ones inspired it and this city, with malign and deranged memories ghosting from its bones, only amplified it.

They were children.

The whole race was in the shadow of alien dominance, but particularly Coyle and those three that stood with him at the threshold of the evil that
was
and the evil that would
be.
Children afraid of the dark and the shadows in the corner, the thing under the bed and that loathsome breathing in the closet. And maybe, and most importantly,
themselves.
For it was inside them. All of them. What the aliens had developed and implanted. Being so close to the city, they could feel it. Feel it gaining strength, rising up to consume their humanity.

They were mired now in horror.

Children shivering in their beds as a branch scrapes at the window and absolutely no one could promise them that that stick was not what their overheated imaginations told them it was.

Coyle could see it in their faces. Cold logic and reason were malfunctioning as something unseen and malefic gained strength. Reality had taken on the silver, surreal shades of madness, of nightmare. Demons were riding the wind and this time they were not hallucinations.

They were stark and real and malevolent.

And inescapable.

It was about that time that the rumbling started again. The same sort of trembling seismic action they'd heard and
felt
in the crevice. It seemed like the city was shaking, weird rhythmic vibrations running through the earth beneath their feet.

In the city, there was a weird sort of shine like phosphorus. They could see it through the honeycombed mouths as if something luminous and large were winding its way through those primeval channels.

“RUN!” Dayton said. “RUN!”

There was no getting around the complete panic in his voice. For unlike the others he knew exactly what it was, what was moving through the ruins just as he knew it was coming for them.

A nightmare horror.

From the bowels of the city.

W
ITH THE STABILICER CLEATS on their boots, the best they could do was an even jog and it was dangerous moving amongst all that shattered masonry, low dips and yawning hollows, the occasional jagged crevice that could have swallowed them alive. It was a manic race and they all knew it was a race for life. They could hear the thing from the city screeching with a piercing, almost hypersonic cry as it gave chase.

By the time they reached the slope, they barely had the strength left to climb it. At least Coyle didn't. But then he was in nowhere near the condition of Dayton and his men. When he moved too slow, clawing up the embankment on his hands and knees, Reja hooked an arm around him and pretty much dragged him to the top.

“Hold it,” Dayton panted, unclipping a white phosphorus grenade from his web belt. “Spread out . . . we'll never outrun that thing. I'd rather face it here than in the tunnel. Stand ready with the flamethrowers.”

They did as they were told.

Coyle could see that thing picking its way towards them, its faint luminous shine lighting up the graveyard dimensions of the grotto. It was plowing over anything in its path—free-standing pillars and polished black towers that looked to be part of the city or another that had sunken into the earth or been swallowed by it. It took them off like saws felling trees, pushing ever forward like some immense glowing fleshy ghost, all the while making that sharp, strident whining sound.

“Get ready,” Dayton said.

The cries of the beast were answered by an uncanny keening sound that rose to a solid wall of almost musical piping, wavering sharply and echoing morbidly through the grotto. This was the Old Ones, Coyle knew, directing their creature.

He heard it approaching the slope.

Closer.

Closer yet.

The tension of the men waiting for it was like an unbroken circuit of dread.

“Jesus,” Long said when it came in sight, moving unbelievably fast.

“Shoggoth,” Dayton said.

It was a slithering fleshy mass of gray and black tissue seamed with pink and red convolutions, a liquiform accumulation of dully luminous protoplasm formed into some great spherical mantle about the size of a pick-up truck. Dozens of rudimentary eyes opened on its greasy surface amongst wiry tendrils and slick bubbles that expanded and deflated like they were breathing.

It moved, it slithered, it wriggled, an abhorrent perpetual motion machine, toad-fleshed, jelly-eyed, an amebal vomit-gush of wormy tissue, oozing pulp, and coiling entrails.

It was repulsive beyond words and the stink of it . . . carrion liquefying with rot.

It waited there.

“Burn it?” Long said, awaiting orders.

Dayton was watching it. “No. Not yet. If it was going to attack, it would have.”

Coyle was shaking. His entire body was shaking. Nothing had ever made him feel like this thing . . . simultaneously sickened, frightened, and raging. At that moment he lived only to kill it.

He watched it in his flashlight beam

And worse,
it
was watching him.

On the mantle of the creature itself, a single huge juicy yellow eye opened and stared at him with a slit pupil. A clear drop of liquid rolled from it like a tear.

It knows me, somehow it knows me,
Coyle found himself thinking as some braying chant—equal parts wicked and withering—echoed through his mind on oil-gloss raven's wings.
It recognizes who I am and where I came from. It knows that it is the progenitor, the godhead sea of life, the keeper of the double-helix.

A thousand disjointed images flew through his head and at such speed he could not grasp even a single one or hope to form a chain of logic from the impressions the Shoggoth gave him. His brain was a fall of black ash and superannuated dust, the ghosts of the eons filling his skull–

The Shoggoth.

That from which all earthly life and the life of a million other worlds had been engineered. But was it wise? He could sense an intelligence there, cold and distant, but an intelligence all the same, one degenerated by the chill rain of millions upon millions of years. And with it . . . something else. Remorse. Self-loathing. A dire hatred of what it was and what it was made to be by its masters, the Old Ones, and an absolute feral loathing for all the life that sprang from its biogenetic loins.

Rising from the warm, dead seas of the Precambrian, it had survived Achaean and Proterozoic time, watched as the Paleozoic became the Mesozoic and finally the Cenozoic, witnessing extinctions and comets, ice ages and the shifting of poles and the rising of mountains and seas turned to deserts. Its kind waited it all out, sleeping away down here in their frozen tombs in black cellars of dead cities while men rose from apelike ancestors and skittered across hillsides like white ants, self-important, brimming with conceit over their mastery of nature and their rising rudimentary intellect, never knowing, never guessing in their supreme arrogance that they had been engineered, created to fulfill a purpose and that purpose was to be harvested, wheat to the scythe as the Old Ones had engineered, modified, and harvested so many life forms.

It was part of the cycle and men were no more important than livestock or germs on a slide.

An organic technology.

Nothing more. Human society, culture, religion—all of it was synthetic, plastic, generated from original archetypes bred into the species to have the very effect they indeed had. Intelligence was developed, genetics modified, brains engineered.

Now came the time of the reaping.

And the Shoggoth recognized it, knowing that it would outlive this little controlled experiment on Earth as it had on a thousand worlds. It was the helix and it was eternal and men were only dust to be scattered by the wind, just another page in its book of days.

But for it all, as it looked upon Coyle with a barely flickering consciousness, it felt sorrow.

Coyle came out of it knowing he had been in some weird psychic uplink with the creature and that it would have gone on for some time because the Shoggoth had the time. An hour, a day, a month or a year or ten of them were all the same to it.

But what broke the connection was the call of its masters.

A keening and shrill, insect-like cry which was the sound of the huntsman's horn that drove the hounds: the beast reacted. It closed that eye and shut Coyle away from it.

He noticed something else right away: that the accretion of those tumor-like bubbles or fleshy nodes were timing their expansions with the dominant keening of those piping voices. And, yes, dear God, there were tiny oval openings at their apexes like . . .
mouths.
Each time he heard those piercing cries, the bubbles expanded and those openings puckered wide.